Hello ladies and gents! As 16% of 2017 has already slipped by, I figured it was time for a bit of an update. As far as my gaming is concerned, this year is already heads and shoulders above last year and there is only one reason why: GTASC.

GTASC started off with a hell of a bang. There are people every year who seem to blow their loads in the first few weeks and that sends scores up for a bit before they normalize, but this year was different. Even taking into consideration the fact that the overall team scores should be higher than last year because there's an additional teammate, the weekly average score needed per team member was higher. Let's compare the score of the lowest surviving team each period from last year to this year (score needed per team member [score/number of team members] is in parentheses):

Period 1 2016: 4,530 (1,132.5) 2017: 5,809 (1,161.8)

Period 2 2016: 4,380 (1,095) 2017: 7,111 (1,422.2)

Period 3 2016: 5,570 (1,392.5) 2017: 7,978 (1,595.6)

Period 4 2016: 6,301 (1,575.25) 2017: 8,966 (1,793.2)

Period 5 2016: 6,193 (1,548.25) 2017: 8,930 (1,786)

Period 62016: 7,157 (1,789.25) 2017: 9,178 (1,835.6)

Period 72016: 7,127 (1781.75) 2017: 9,604 (1,920.8)

There were some pretty big jumps on the team side from week to week early on this year, but things seemed to have slowed down and are increasing at a more steady pace. I'm actually rather pleased that things have started cruising along now, so there's a much clearer target for the week without having to worry too much about underestimating it. Overall, this year has seemed to test of mettle of teams more than last year and some of the newer teams found out rather quickly that the big boys came to play this year. My team probably won't make it past June, but I'll definitely be keeping an eye on the leaderboards until the end because this should be a good one.

On the individual side, the scoring is higher, as well. Most would have assumed that would be the case since one of the rules changed this year. In previous years, signing up for the team competition automatically entered you in the individual competition, whether you wanted to be in it or not. That lead to the contest dragging on until all the non-competitive people were eliminated. This year, you had to actually sign up for the individual side if you wanted to compete. This definitely ramped up the pace of the competition significantly. To put it in perspective, the lowest scoring person who survived last period scored 1,290 points and survived by literally fractions of a TA point. Last year in the same period, the lowest scoring survivor had 334 points. That's right folks, you're going to need your big boy (or girl) britches to make it far on the individual side this year. I think that change to require manual registration was an excellent decision.

Because of all the crazy scores, I've been putting up about 2000 TA per week. Without GTASC, I don't think that I would have jumped back into scoring so quickly. I'm glad that I'm in this thing. In two months, I've already surpassed my gamerscore, TA score, achievements earned, and completed games for the entire year of 2016. (When I take a year off of gaming, I REALLY take a year off of gaming.) Thanks to the generosity of a secret Santa, I got a TA Pro subscription in December and I've been able to set up numerous goals to achieve this year and track their progress. I've also been able to create some new goals on the fly. For example, I recently hit a milestone of 11,000 achievements won and immediately made a goal to have 11,500 achievements won by June. Despite my saltiness for the price change fiasco, I will never downplay or dismiss the usefulness of TA Pro for pushing yourself to gaming greatness when you have a lot of goals to accomplish or leaderboards to be tracked on.

Speaking of leaderboards, many of my goals are tied to moving up various point and click leaderboards. "Why," you might ask? "I have no clue," I might reply. I like point and clicks, especially Telltale ones, because it's like reading an interactive book. I guess that's just my inner nerd. There isn't really much of a challenge to this goal, as it doesn't really require any skill to point and click your way to a completion, but it's pretty relaxing. So I've been leisurely working my way through games here and there when I'm not succumbing to my latest addiction: Fallout.

I have never really played a Fallout game before this year. I think I may have toyed around in New Vegas for a brief while and I popped one achievement in Fallout 3 for a Bean Dive and never played again. I bought Fallout 4 when it came out because it had a lovely collectors edition with the Pip-Boy, but I never played it until this year. Holy cow, why didn't you people tell me what I've been missing?!?!?! I am absolutely in love with the game. I am 200+ hours into the game and I haven't even done the 4th story mission yet. I love doing side quests and exploring to get materials so that I can do some crafting and build up my settlements. There is so much to do, the game is beautifully made, the mechanics and leveling systems are well thought out...Fallout 4 is my game of 2017. (Yeah, I'm late on this one. So what if it was everyone else's game of 2015? Sue me.) If that wasn't magical enough, Fallout Shelter recently came to Xbox, so I've been playing that too. I may be partial, since I love resource management games, but it's a fun game and doesn't try to use the enraging mechanics that other free-to-play games use to annoy you into spending real money. As far as I'm concerned, Bethesda is my favorite and we're totally going to be BFFs forever.

Well, I think that's about all I have for now. You can check out my TA page to see my latest gaming goals and progress. Also feel free to check out my game collection and give me a shout if there's anything that I can help you out with.

Much appreciation to all who have taken the time to read my blog. Until next time, stay frosty and game on! ​